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Sunday, August 24, 2014

3 Different Things You Can Do With Google Classroom

This article was first appeared on EdudemicGoogle’s advance in the education field has brought to
schools around the globe affordable devices and effortless access to
educational content.Google’s latest
solution for learning is called Google Classroom.Although Google Classroom will be available
at the beginning of the school year to all schools that have adopted Google
Apps for Education, the Mountain View based company granted access to Google
Classroom to a select few individuals in July.

Image courtesy: Edudemic

I was fortunate enough to be one of these
early adopters/testers of Google Classroom, and I can honestly say that I am
impressed by its simplicity, and its ability to seamlessly integrate Google’s
Docs, Sheets, Drive, and Gmail in order to provide a wonderful and highly
productive user experience.

Overall Design &
Purpose

Google Classroom’s design is absolutely stunning.Following the latest design trends, the
interface is simple, elegant, and free of unnecessary distractions, created to
help the user focus on productivity.Google Classroom features some of the best tools teachers can use to
manage and distribute assignments and class announcements.Also, it provides teachers and students with
a safe environment to communicate with each other and exchange ideas and
comments on educational content.Of
course, all these perks come absolutely free, and because this is a Google
product, you are guaranteed a user experience of superb quality.

Paperless Classroom with
Google Classroom

Regardless of the subject you teach, Google Classroom is a
fantastic tool for teachers who wish to create a paperless classroom
environment that allows the teacher to have instant access to student work, and
manage every aspect of the classroom workflow digitally.With Google Classroom a teacher can manage
multiple classes.Within the Google
Classroom environment, the teacher can create and distribute assignments and
announcements to each class, edit and return student work for revision, grade
student work, initiate and participate in whole class or private discussions,
and have overall a seamless paperless assignment workflow that eliminates all
the tedious and time consuming tasks that take up a lot of instructional
time.This extra time can be allocated
to learning.

The true power of Google Classroom lays in the fact that it
weaves together Google Docs, Sheets, Gmail, and Drive to eliminate the need for
hard copies.This allows teachers to:

·Create a document, a spreadsheet, a
presentation, or a form

·Distribute this assignment to students

·Customize due dates, organization of content, and
copies of the assignment for every student

Obviously,
Google Classroom can be a useful tool for 1:1 and BYOD settings, where every
student is able to access class content on his/her device, and receive
real-time feedback from their teacher.

Google Classroom may be the perfect tool a teacher can use
to flip a lesson or an entire class.The
flipped classroom’s ability to personalize learning to all students and make
them take ownership of their learning can be greatly enhanced with Google
Classroom.For instance, videos,
presentations, and other material can be delivered to students outside of class
using Google Classroom.Students can not
only access and review content, but also have a safe avenue for online
discussions with their teacher or other students that can clarify
misconceptions and help students master the content.In addition, due to the fact that often many
students have the same questions, Google Classroom’s discussion threads, which
are visible to all students, can be a lifesaver for many students, especially
for the ones who are too shy to ask questions overtly.

Professional
Development with Google Classroom

Google Classroom’s primary purpose is be used in the
classroom by teachers and students, however, nothing can stop us from finding
more creative ways to take advantage of such a wonderful tool of content
delivery and organization.Since we are
approaching the beginning of the school year, naturally, professional
development might be one of the areas that comes first to mind.

Google Classroom can be used by schools and districts to
organize and deliver professional development content for teachers.In fact, our school will be one of the first
schools in the country that will use Google Classroom for this purpose this
coming school year.Trainers/presenters
can create a class/training and import the participants/teachers in the class,
or simply send them an email with the code to access the class.Before, during, or after the training, the
presenter can share with the participants a number of resources such as
presentation slides, multimedia files, and other documents.The participants can communicate live with
each other during the training, exchanging ideas and working collaboratively on
projects.Finally, after the training,
due to the fact that when someone uses Google Classroom, a folder is created in
their Drive and all content is saved in that folder automatically, the
participants will have access to all of the materials they used or developed in
the training, not to mention the fact that during the training they will have
gained a lot of knowledge about how to use Google Classroom with their own
students!

Nikolaos Chatzopoulos currently teaches 4th
grade Math and Science at Plato Academy, in Clearwater, Florida. He is a
technology enthusiast, and enjoys discovering ways to incorporate technology in
the classroom in meaningful ways, in order to provide opportunities for
authentic learning experiences.